


passe arriére

by theninthmember



Category: Fence (Comics)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, more abt the friendship than the romance but do not trip: these boys want to kiss each other, state championships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27248149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theninthmember/pseuds/theninthmember
Summary: When Nicholas finally finds Seiji, he expects to find him like this: smoothing his hair back, adjusting his jacket, looking perfect and cold and untouchable.Here’s how Nicholas finds him: gripping the edge of the sink, white-knuckled, white-faced, gasping for breath, shaking all over.or: the prospect of losing to jesse coste, and what it means in the long run. featuring bathroom panic attacks, a shared water bottle, and the practical definition of having someone’s back.
Relationships: Nicholas Cox & Seiji Katayama, Nicholas Cox/Seiji Katayama
Comments: 10
Kudos: 88





	passe arriére

**Author's Note:**

> i've had this in my drafts for months, thought it was about time to clean it up and post lmao.
> 
> warning for panic attacks and vomit/emetophobia.
> 
> enjoy!!

When Nicholas finally finds Seiji, he expects to find him like this: smoothing his hair back, adjusting his jacket, looking perfect and cold and untouchable. 

If it had been Eugene, Nicholas would have been more worried; it wouldn’t be the first time his pre-bout jitters got the best of him. 

But Eugene is surprisingly calm today. “Win or lose, bro, I know you guys have got my back,” he said when Nicholas asked him about it earlier. 

It’s a nice sentiment, but Nicholas is aiming for the  _ win _ part of  _win or lose_. And they can't win against Exton without Seiji. 

Nicholas has checked both bathrooms on this side of the stadium, and Seiji wasn’t in either of them, so Nicholas weaves through the crowd and makes his way around the arena. Most of the far side of the building is supposed to be off-limits—Seiji probably didn’t want to rub elbows with all of the  _ commoners _ in the public bathrooms. 

The people start thinning out as Nicholas approaches an unlit hallway leading to storage closets and extra locker rooms. He checks to make sure no one is watching, and starts down it.

If it had been Eugene, Nicholas would have at least noticed he was missing. But Seiji is always quiet when he watches matches. It isn’t  _ Nicholas’s _ fault Seiji slipped off without telling anyone, and it isn’t Nicholas who pointedly ignored the buddy system Coach ordered them to use. But neither fact stopped Harvard from looking disappointed in him and telling him to go find Seiji immediately.

Now he has to miss the rest of MLC’s match because Seiji couldn’t wait to fix his hair, or whatever. Nicholas kicks at the floor. It’s not even fair. Harvard  _ knows _ Seiji’s not Eugene. Seiji’s pretty much a legend in the fencing world. If he’s taking longer than he should on his little bathroom break, it’s probably just because his fan club finally cornered him.

The thought takes some of the sting out of missing the match. Watching Seiji try to deal with his fans is usually pretty funny.

Nicholas reaches a ‘T’ in the hallway, with sections branching off on his right and left. He’s about to choose left, because it’s lucky, but then he pauses. In the unlucky hallway, he notices a bar of soft light coming from under one of the doors.

Nicholas grins.  _ Found you, _ he thinks, approaching the door. Maybe he’ll make it back in time to see who wins, after all. 

He pushes open the door and lets exaggerated annoyance seep into his voice. “ _Seiji_ ,” he calls. “We’re missing MLC’s—” 

Here’s how Nicholas finds him: gripping the edge of the sink, white-knuckled, white-faced, gasping for breath, shaking all over.

Nicholas closes the door behind him. “Seiji?” he says again, taking a step closer.

Seiji’s head snaps toward him. “Get out,” he growls.

Luckily, Nicholas knows when to ignore directions. “What’s wrong?” he asks, taking another step closer. “Are you hurt?” Nicholas can’t see any injuries, but it must be something bad if Seiji looks this shaken up.

“ _No_ ,” Seiji snaps. “I’m fine, just—just get out!”

“I _can’t_ ,” Nicholas says. “Harvard sent me to get you. MLC’s match is almost over, so we need to get ready to face—”

Seiji whirls around, but without the support of the sink he sways slightly. Nicholas thinks for a second that his legs are shaking too hard to hold him up, and he reaches out on instinct, but Seiji regains his balance a moment later and steps out of reach.

“I’m not fencing,” he says. 

Nicholas’s mind goes blank. “What?” 

It takes him a second to process the words, because Seiji can’t have possibly said what Nicholas thinks he said. “Seiji, what are you saying? You  _ have _ to fence. This is the match we’ve been waiting for!”

_ The match _ you’ve  _ been waiting for, _ he doesn’t say. He shouldn’t  _ have _ to. Seiji’s been itching to face off against Exton since he made the team. Longer, even. Probably ever since the last buzzer went off at nationals, pushing Seiji firmly into second place.

“If you’re not with us, Jesse will—”

“I don’t care,” Seiji snarls. “I’m not fencing. I won’t.”

Nicholas feels anger pricking at his skin. “Do you  _ want _ us to lose?” he says. “I don’t get why you—”

“No, you _don’t_ —get it!” Seiji yells, breathing heavy. “You’re not—a good enough fencer—to get it!”

Nicholas takes another step forward and grabs a fistful of Seiji’s fencing jacket. “Say that again,” he says.

Seiji shoves him off, chest heaving. “You’re not—you aren’t  _ good _ enough to—to understand the level Jesse’s on. We can’t— _beat_ him.”

“So you’re just gonna ditch us to get creamed? I know you suck at being on a team, Seiji, but this is something else, even for you!”

“I have to—face Jesse at nationals!” Seiji says. “If I lose today he’ll—I’ll—” He pauses, a hand clutching at the fabric over his stomach. “If I lose, I’ll—If I _lose_ —”

Suddenly, Seiji’s whole body stiffens. He pushes past Nicholas and rushes into a stall to part with his breakfast. Nicholas winces. Maybe this  _ is _ pre-bout jitters. But even Eugene had never threatened to abandon the team. 

_Win or lose, bro, I know you guys have got my back_ , he’d said. 

Nicholas frowns. Maybe… maybe Seiji  _ doesn’t _ know that.

The thought makes him feel weird. He shrugs off his drawstring bag and rummages through it. He finds a pencil, a crumpled protein bar wrapper, and a lone sock before finally, his fingers wrap around the cold plastic of his water bottle. 

When Seiji finally pushes himself back to lean against the metal wall, his breathing ragged, Nicholas takes a seat on the floor beside him. It’s not a comfortable position, halfway out of the stall, with the doorframe digging into his back, but he settles in anyway.

Seiji doesn’t look at him. “What are you still doing here?” The words sound too miserable to have any bite to them.

“Dunno,” Nicholas says. “Guess I thought you might need a friend right about now.”

“I don’t,” Seiji snaps. “I’m _fine_.”

Nicholas raises his eyebrows, and after a moment Seiji huffs, crossing his arms over his knees. 

Nicholas holds out the water bottle. Seiji looks over at it, and then at Nicholas, and then back again, like he’s trying to decipher some kind of code.

“It’s not poisoned,” Nicholas says.

Seiji snatches it from his hand with a scowl. Nicholas watches him carefully unscrew the cap before taking a sip.

“What happens if you lose?” Nicholas asks. 

Seiji freezes, his shoulders tensing. “What?”

“Harvard said that state won’t affect your national ranking,” Nicholas points out. “So what’s the worst that could happen if you lose?”

Seiji swallows hard. “I told Jesse I’d beat him,” he says finally.

Nicholas pauses, waiting for more, but nothing else comes. “Okay…” he says. “And… don’t you want to?”

“Of course I—” Seiji cuts off and takes a deep breath. “You  _ saw _ him against Pennbrook. He’s in top form today and I—I am not ready. If I go up against him today, I won’t win.”

Nicholas wants to argue that of  course they’ll win, but the look on Seiji’s face makes him rethink it. “Okay,” he says instead. “What’s wrong with that?”

You’d think Nicholas asked what’s wrong with kicking a puppy or setting a house on fire, with the look Seiji gives him.

“If I don’t _win_ ,” Seiji says, like he’s talking to a toddler, “I’ll _lose_.”

Nicholas resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Sure, but then you’ll win at nationals,” he says. He still doesn’t see the problem. “The news people aren’t gonna care if you lose today, they’ll just say we held you back, or whatever. You can still beat him.”

Seiji shakes his head. “If I lose today, the rest doesn’t matter. I won’t be able to face him again with that under my belt.”

“Why not?”

“I—I just won’t, okay?” he says, his fingers tightening around the water bottle. “I told him I’d beat him if I went to Kings Row, and if I don’t it will just prove that he’s—” Seiji cuts off with a full body shudder. “If I lose today, it’s all over,” he says quietly. “That’s it for me.”

The words make Nicholas’s blood runs cold. “You’ll quit?” he asks, disbelieving.

Seiji shrugs.

Nicholas tries to picture Seiji without fencing. He tries to picture fencing without Seiji. Both images make his blood go from cold to boiling.

“Bullshit,” he says. Seiji looks over at him, startled, but it doesn’t cool Nicholas down—it just makes him angrier. “That’s bullshit!” he repeats. “I lose _all the time_. I lose to you every time we fence! Do you see me giving up? Do you see me whining every time I have to face you on the _piste_?”

“It’s not the same,” Seiji insists. 

“Then explain it to me, Seiji!” Nicholas says. “Because I don’t understand how you could even  _ consider _ giving up fencing just because you don’t like to lose.”

Seiji looks worked up now, but Nicholas can’t bring himself to focus on it over the anger burning in his chest. “You—you’re  _ used _ to—”

“Nope,” Nicholas says sharply. “Do you  _ really _ want to tell me right now that I’m  _ used _ to losing?”

Seiji runs a hand through his hair. “ _No_ ," he says, frustrated. "That’s not—that’s not what I meant—”

“Then what  _ do _ you mean?” Nicholas presses.

“You know _how!_ ” Seiji shouts. “I don’t know  how!” He goes pale after he says it, mouth closing so fast Nicholas hears his teeth clack together.

Nicholas’s anger sputters and dies like a candle under a bucket of water. “You don’t know how to what?”

Seiji looks anywhere but his eyes. “I don’t know how to _lose_ ,” he says softly. “I never have. Every time… it’s like the ground swallows me up. Like there’s no space around me. I hate it. I train every day so that it never feels like that.”

Nicholas remembers his first match against Seiji. The despair he’d felt that night, looking over his bruises. Like he’d lost more than just a regional tournament.

“You do get used to it,” he says finally. “It doesn’t get easier, but you get used to it.”

Seiji shakes his head slowly. “There isn't time.”

He’s right, of course. There's no time to get acclimated to loss ten minutes before their match. Nicholas knows that, but he can’t stop trying to think of some way to fix this.

Beside him, Seiji takes a shaky breath. “Coach said this would happen,” he admits.

“She… did?” Nicholas says, because Coach Williams is scary smart, but she’s not _psychic_. Is she? Actually, Nicholas thinks, that would make a lot of sense.

Seiji nods. “She said that if I didn’t learn how to lose, eventually I wouldn’t be able to fence at all. But I didn’t listen, and now I’m—the thought of losing makes me feel sick, and the thought of  _ fencing _ makes me feel sick, and I’m—" He takes a breath, deep and unsteady, "I can’t do it, Nicholas. I can’t fence. I just can’t.”

Nicholas stares at him. At the sheen of sweat on his forehead. The dark circles under his eyes. His hair, all out of place, without even an effort to smooth it back down.

This isn’t just pre-bout jitters, Nicholas realizes, and it isn’t just Seiji being an asshole. This is _fear_. This is Seiji when he’s scared.

Nicholas is speaking before his brain can catch up with his mouth.

“I’ll do it.”

Seiji turns and looks at Nicholas like he just spoke fluent Portuguese. “What?”

Nicholas’s brain finally kicks into gear, but he refuses to back down now. “You can’t fence,” he says. “I’m the reserve. So I’ll fight Jesse. Then you'll have nothing to worry about at nationals.”

Seiji stares at him, mouth open. This is not an uncommon thing for Seiji to do when Nicholas talks, but usually the expression on his face is something closer to shocked outrage. Now, it’s something else. Nicholas isn’t sure what.

“You…” Seiji says quietly. 

Nicholas becomes aware of many things at once: his face is very close to Seiji’s; Seiji’s eyes are so deep a brown they’re almost black; the distance between their noses is less than a pencil-length; when Seiji’s gaze focuses on you it feels like the world isn’t turning anymore; Seiji’s breath smells like vomit; Nicholas wants to move closer to Seiji and his vomit breath. 

“Yeah?” he whispers.

Seiji is still looking at him with that unreadable expression and everything feels still and hanging, and Nicholas isn’t sure what this feeling is but he thinks he doesn’t want it to stop, he thinks maybe he wants to lean in and—

“You don’t stand a chance,” finishes Seiji.

The world starts turning again, and the moment is over. Nicholas sits back with a huff. 

“Right, awesome, thank you for the vote of…” He trails off when he sees that Seiji’s expression has not changed.

“You don’t stand a chance,” Seiji repeats. “And you… you would do that?”

Nicholas realizes suddenly that the word for Seiji’s expression is _awe_. Seiji Katayama is looking at Nicholas with awe in his eyes. He never thought he’d see the day.

“Of course,” Nicholas says, when he remembers how to talk. “Of course I would. That’s what friends are for, right?”

He expects Seiji to contradict him, like,  _ No, Nicholas, I’ve been doing research and it seems like friends are actually only for fencing practice and blah, blah, blah... _ But that doesn’t happen.

Instead, Seiji’s face does this weird thing, scrunching up for a second before smoothing back out. Then it happens again, and his breathing hitches, and if Nicholas didn’t know any better he’d think Seiji was about to—

Seiji slaps a hand over his face and turns away with a choked noise, scrubbing furiously at his eyes. 

Nicholas stares, unsure of what to do. He's not good with words, especially not words of comfort. If it were Bobby or Eugene, Nicholas could wrap an arm around them and squeeze them to his side. But Seiji doesn’t like hugs, not even side hugs. He’s fine with fist bumps, though, and a hand on the shoulder, usually, so maybe…

Hesitantly, Nicholas puts a hand on the small of Seiji’s back. The muscles tense under Nicholas’s fingers, but Seiji doesn’t jerk away, or tell him to stop, or bite his hand off. So Nicholas keeps it there, and begins moving it in slow circles. 

Seiji’s shoulders start to shake. Nicholas pretends not to notice, just like he pretends not to hear the uneven breaths and swallowed hiccups of a person trying very hard to stop crying this instant.

He thinks about their match with Exton. If he takes the place of the closer, Jesse will be the second fencer he goes up against. Nicholas doesn’t have Seiji’s perfect technique or his knack for defense; he’ll lose points in that bout, almost certainly. The rest of the team might not be able to make those points up.

There’s a good chance they’ll lose, without Seiji there. But as Nicholas looks over at him, sitting on the bathroom floor in his fencing uniform, he decides he doesn’t care.

If Seiji quits fencing, Jesse will win. Jesse will get him and Nicholas will lose him and it will be just like everything else in Nicolas's life. He's sick of Jesse always getting his way. If Nicholas fights, then even if he loses, Seiji will stay. Even if he loses, Nicholas will get to keep the morning training sessions and the group breakfasts and the conversations in the dark, for just a little while longer.

Nicholas thinks he might do anything to keep Seiji here.

Eventually, Seiji’s shaking subsides, and his breathing evens out, only interrupted by the occasional sniffle. He shifts out from under Nicholas’s hand, and takes a long sip from the water bottle. He’s still partially hiding his face behind one hand.

“I finished your water,” he says, though it sounds more like a croak. He puts the lid on the empty bottle one-handed and hands it back to Nicholas without looking at him.

Nicholas tilts his head to one side. What little he can see of Seiji’s face through his splayed fingers is bright red. 

“It’s cool,” Nicholas says. “It was only half-full.”

“You should fill your water bottle completely on competition days,” Seiji reminds him. “There are several refill stations in the building.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas says, not really listening.

The door to the bathroom opens, causing both of them to jump.

“Nicholas? Seiji?” comes Eugene’s voice.

With a glance at Seiji, Nicholas leaps to his feet. He knows without being told that Seiji does not want anyone else to see him like this; he barely tolerated Nicholas seeing him like this. Nicholas slips quietly out of the stall, thankful that it’s not in view of the door and at just enough of an angle in the mirror to obscure anyone inside.

“I’m in here,” Nicholas says.

Eugene steps inside, looking relieved. “MLC lost. We’re up. You find Seiji?”

“He’s back in our room. He’s sick.”

The relief is wiped from Eugene’s face. “Bro, what? Seiji’s sick?”

In the mirror, Nicholas can just barely see Seiji shooting him a murderous look and shaking his head fiercely.

“ _Super_ sick,” Nicholas confirms. “Way too sick to fight, and too sick to watch the match, even. Yeah, it’s probably better if he just _ stays in the hotel room _ for the rest of the day, since he’s  _ so _ sick.”

Eugene nods supportively. “Man, I didn’t know that guy  _ could _ get sick. Must be bad if it’s keeping him from grinding up Jesse’s bones for his bread.”

“You mean for his protein shake,” Nicholas says, pushing open the door. 

Eugene snorts as he follows him out. “Bro, I  _ hope _ I haven’t been eating bones in my protein shakes.”

“Why? Bones are full of protein.”

Eugene squints at him. “I’m not sure that’s true, bud.”

“Really?” Nicholas says. “Well, they’re full of something.” 

Beside him, Eugene slows to a halt, and Nicholas does the same. “Hey, bro…” Eugene says, looking troubled. “I don’t know if we’ve got this without Seiji.” 

“We’ll be fine,” Nicholas says without hesitating. He realizes with surprise that he actually _means_ it. “We’ve got each other’s backs, right? Win or lose.”

That’s what being on a team really means. Seiji might not get that yet, but Nicholas will show him. Nicholas isn't a perfect fencer, and he isn't a perfect friend, but this is something he can do. Nicholas will always, always have Seiji's back.

Eugene gives him a shaky grin. “Right,” he says. “Win or lose.” He holds up a fist, and Nicholas pounds it. “You ready?”

Nicholas smiles. “I’m ready.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! leave a comment or kudos if you enjoyed!! <3


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